With the advent of increasingly powerful mobile devices, better connectivity, new generations of gaming consoles, and smart televisions, to name a few recent innovations, the video gaming industry is advancing. Despite these and other technological advances, the challenge remains to game developers to make their respective video games interesting to users so that they may recoup their investment in making such video games. Apart from a captivating story line and action, this challenge is often addressed within video games by a balanced game economy. That is, the game economy is constructed in such a way that it provides a balance between (i) the size of the rewards given to users in exchange for monetary compensation or demonstration of skill and (ii) maintenance of a sufficient level of game difficulty to keep users engaged.
If the awards provided in a video game are too large or distributed too frequently, the game will be deemed too easy to master and user retention will degrade. Moreover, if the awards are too large, the user will not be inclined to spend more money to acquire future awards. If, on the other hand, awards are too small or are not distributed frequently enough, the game will be deemed too difficult to master and user retention will degrade in such situations as well.
Given the above background, new and innovative ways to provide rewards to users in exchange for monetary compensation or skill are needed in the art in order to improve user retention in video games and to improve the return on video game investment.